Day: September 18, 2010

[Graham Auld] got his hands on an energy monitor for free from his utility company. The device seen in the insert provides a nice LCD display but he wanted a way to graph the data over time. There was an included cable and a method of using Google PowerMeter but only for Windows computers. He did a little poking around and came up with a Perl script to interface the meter with Google’s tools.

The hardware module is known as the Current Cost CC128 and the developer was nice enough to publish an XML output description which [Graham] used in his script. From there it’s just a matter of registering and authenticating through the Google PowerMeter API. The script is not fully polished yet but it serves as a road map for your own implementation.

This beautifully crafted Daft Punk table with iPod dock was built by [Dustin Evans]. The table itself was built with the help of a friend in one day with electronics added a bit later. It features an 8×8 grid of boxes with red LEDs mounted inside. The picture above is not quite the finished product, a diffuser will be added later to augment the scattering of light already provided by cutting the tip off of each LED. On the underside you’ll find a power supply and a set of speakers. The system is controlled by an Arduino which resides in the same drawer as the dock. See the final product in the clip after the break.

Intel says that HDCP has been cracked, but they also say that it’s unlikely this information will be used to unlock the copying of anything. Their reasoning for the second statement is that for someone to make this work they would need to produce a computer chip, not something that is worth the effort.

We question that logic. Not so much for Blu-Ray, which is the commonly associated media format that uses HDCP, but for HD digital cable programming. There are folks out there who would like to have the option of recording their HD television shows without renting a DVR from the cable company. CableCard tuners have been mostly absent from the market, making this type of recording difficult or impossible. Now that there’s a proven way to get the encryption key for HDCP how hard would it really be to create a man-in-the-middle device that uses that key to authenticate, decrypt, and funnel the audio and video to another encoder card? We know next-to-nothing about the protocol but why couldn’t any powerful processor, like an ARM, or even an FPGA (both rather inexpensive and readily available) be programmed for this task?

Leave a comment to let us know what you think about HDCP, and what the availability of the master-key really means.

This USB to Zipit Dock adapter and a special kernel makes USB host mode for the Zipit possible. Previously, the cheap and hackable wireless client needed a hardware modification to enable USB support. The new kernel bootloader, called U-Boot, makes the internal alterations unnecessary (see the demo after the break). Now the only caveat is one of voltage. Zipit only supplies 3.3V when running on battery so your choices are to only use USB when the Zipit is plugged into a charger, or use a powered USB hub. But if you’re already building a hub adapter it shouldn’t be too much trouble to add in the option for a battery-powered hub.